Loading...

Four back-to-school audience segments you’re probably overlooking (but shouldn’t be)

Published: May 5, 2025 by Experian Marketing Services

Don't miss out on these overlooked back-to-school audiences

Back-to-school season remains one of the biggest retail moments of the year—and 2025 is expected to follow suit. Total spending is projected to reach $84.51 billion, with K–12 shoppers alone contributing nearly $50 billion—59% of the total. E-commerce will also play a major role, accounting for 37.4% of total back-to-school sales.

However, 2025 shoppers may be facing even higher costs due to the incoming tariffs with everything from laptops and lunchboxes to kids’ clothing and crayons becoming more expensive. In anticipation of these rising prices, shoppers might once again start early to score deals. Last year, 55% of back-to-school and college shoppers had already started buying items in July for the upcoming school year. This early start coincided with major July promotions like Amazon Prime Day, in which U.S. shoppers spent a record $14.2 billion online, where school-related purchases surged by over 200%.

Whether you’re marketing school essentials or offering services to help students succeed, it’s easy to default to the same go-to audiences. This blog post highlights overlooked back-to-school segments to help you build personalized back-to-school strategies that resonate with students, parents, and educators. You can find the complete audience segment names in the appendix.

School the competition: How Experian can help you connect with 2025 shoppers

With summer just around the corner, back-to-school might not be top of mind, but there’s no better time to start planning. Whether you’re reaching parents, students, or educators, Experian’s syndicated audiences can help ensure your marketing messages make the honor roll by landing with the right people at the right time.

  • Experian’s 2,400+ syndicated audiences are available directly on over 30 leading television, social, programmatic advertising platforms, and directly within Audigent for activation within private marketplaces (PMPs).
  • Reach consumers based on who they are, where they live, and their household makeup. Experian ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset for key back-to-school attributes such as Presence of Children.
  • Access to unique audiences through Experian’s Partner Audiences available on Experian’s data marketplace, within Audigent for activation in PMPs, and directly on platforms like DirectTV, Dish, Magnite, OpenAP, and The Trade Desk.

Meet your overlooked back-to-school audiences

Back-to-school shoppers aren’t one-size-fits-all. From parents prepping supply lists to students outfitting dorms, reaching the right audience is key to making the grade with your campaign.

Let’s go beyond the basics. Here are four back-to-school audience categories you can target with Experian:

  1. New year, new gear-ers
  2. Weeknight TV watchers
  3. Parenting personas
  4. School-season meal planners

Let’s open our notebooks and break down the audience segments within each group. Whether your customers are buying backpacks, stocking the fridge, or searching for school essentials, these insights will help your campaign pass with flying colors.

New year, new gear-er

New year, new gear-er

From teens picking out their first-day outfit to college students stocking up for dorm life, these audiences represent a wide range of priorities, needs, and spending behaviors. They’re also heavily influenced by trends, technology, and value-driven purchases.

Don’t overlook these five high-potential audiences in your strategy:

  1. Big-Box Electronics Stores: High Spenders
  2. Amazon Frequent Spenders
  3. Department Store Deal Shoppers In Store Spenders
  4. Teen Apparel (Clothing): Online and In Store High Spenders
  5. Dell Computer and Apple Mac Purchaser
Weeknight TV watchers

Weeknight TV watchers

Back-to-school season is also back-to-routine season. Families are gathering for more shared TV time in the evenings—especially in August and September. This makes co-viewing households a prime audience for messaging tied to school-year prep.

Rethink your back-to-school approach with these five overlooked segments:

  1. Co-Watchers
  2. Co-Watchers with Children
  3. Cord Cutters: Recent
  4. Engagement Channel Preference: Streaming TV
  5. Digital Video
Parenting personas

Parenting personas

Targeting by household structure helps tailor messaging to the right family dynamic—whether it’s parents with toddlers or households with college students.

Four audiences you might be missing this back-to-school season:

  1. Digital Moms and Dads
  2. Sports Utility Families
  3. Colleges and Cafes
  4. Kids and Cabernet
School season meal planners

School-season meal planners

Food and grocery shopping routines shift during the school season. These audiences are ideal for promotions tied to lunch prep, after-school snacks, and weeknight meals.

Add these four under-the-radar audiences for back-to-school success:

  1. Online Grocery Delivery Services: High Spenders
  2. Grocery Stores: High Spenders
  3. Fast Food/QSR Frequent Spenders
  4. Fast Food/QSR Pizza Frequent Spenders
Core back-to-school shoppers

Core back-to-school shoppers

Of course, you’ll want to add traditional back-to-school audiences to your strategy. These audiences are highly engaged and often the decision-makers, making them ideal for marketers looking to drive purchase intent early and often.

Here are four key back-to-school audiences you can target–all are available by life stage to reach PreK, elementary, middle, and high school households:

  1. Back to School Supplies
  2. Back to School Moderate Spend
  3. Back to School High Spend
  4. Back to School Apparel

Make the grade with Experian this back-to-school season

As marketers gear up for the back-to-school season, it’s the perfect time to sharpen your strategy and connect with back-to-school shoppers. Whether you’re building tried-and-true segments or exploring more unexpected, high-potential groups you might have not considered, Experian can help you reach the right audience. If you’re looking to create targeted segments for activation across digital and TV or gain insights to guide your campaign planning, Experian has you covered.

Need a custom audience? Reach out to our audience team and we can help you build and activate an Experian audience on the platform of your choice. Additionally, work with Experian’s network of data providers to build audiences and send to an Audigent PMP for activation.

Circana, Kontext, Sport Innovation Lab logos

You can activate our syndicated audiences on-the-shelf of most major platforms. For a full list of Experian’s syndicated audiences and activation destinations, download our syndicated audiences guide.

Explore our other seasonal audiences that you can activate today.

Activate back-to-school audiences today with Audigent

Ready to ace your back-to-school campaigns? Audigent will build customized deals that combine premium Experian syndicated or Partner Audiences and inventory into a single, streamlined deal ID – tailored to your campaign needs. Plus, our powerful supply-side optimization ensures your campaigns deliver top marks in performance.

Connect with the Audigent team today at AudigentAgency_Brands@experian.com to get a head-start on back-to-school success.


Contact us

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.


Latest posts

Loading…
Introducing Switchboard

Adapt with Tapad, a part of Experian Leading browsers have made public announcements and technical deployments to reduce the digital advertising accessibility of third-party cookies for data collection, storage, and sharing due to growing privacy concerns. As a result, there has been growing momentum to find an alternative via cookieless IDs, with the intent to create a replacement that helps ensure continuity across the ecosystem.  At Tapad we’ve chosen to approach the market with a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for these cookieless identifiers, so that marketers can continue to work with the identity providers of their choice while maintaining the most holistic view of consumers across digital touchpoints. Introducing switchboard Switchboard is a module within The Tapad Graph that leverages our core capabilities across machine learning and identity management to provide a connection between traditional digital identifiers and the new wave of cookieless IDs that will be utilized in the future.  Customers of Tapad can take advantage of its broad ecosystem of identifiers to drive targeting and frequency capping strategies and enable detailed measurement and attribution post-deprecation of the third-party cookie. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption, scale, and utility of cookieless IDs with the release of the Switchboard module within The Tapad Graph, while maintaining an agnostic approach to the market. Switchboard for identity solutions In the evolving landscape agencies and marketers will need to invest, test, and analyze the best combination of cookieless ID partners to meet their objectives.  The Switchboard module will increase the utility and value of the cookieless ID space in conjunction with other addressable IDs,  by providing a layer of connectivity that will be natively missing with the deprecation of third-party cookies.  Identity solutions at launch: Switchboard for graph customers For existing Tapad customers who leverage the Switchboard module in The Tapad Graph, it will provide a seamless way to facilitate interoperability while resolving identity back to a Household or Individual. By providing this translation layer, Tapad will take on the responsibility of encryption and decryption protocols where applicable, which will deliver added functionality to our customers.  Tapad + Experian partners at launch: Use cases Resolve existing first-party data with new cookieless solutions through The Tapad Graph to minimize data loss Frequency cap at the Individual and Household level via Cookieless and traditional ID Reach consumers at scale across all touchpoints and IDs   Build a more inclusive and holistic view of the consumer journey Run accurate and scalable measurement before and after the formal deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome Map online data into offline activities  Hear why industry leaders are adapting with Tapad + Experian As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, a part of Experian, on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers. With the imminent loss of cookies, advertisers must think creatively in order to respectfully engage consumers in a privacy-compliant way and Switchboard can play an important role in addressing their respective identity needs.  — Bryan Everett | Senior Vice President of Global Business Development | Amobee   Connecting offline and online shopper activity in a privacy-compliant way is fundamental to marketing effectiveness and determining return on ad-spend. That’s why we’re excited to be a launch partner for Tapad + Experian's Switchboard offering; it provides a unified solution for supporting the variety of proprietary and anonymous user ID standards required by advertising demand-side platforms today.  — Brian Dunphy | SVP Digital Business and Strategic Partnerships | Catalina   As the industry evolves, Tapad + Experian's Switchboard presents a privacy-safe solution that allows for the continued activation of data and an alternative to advertising within walled garden environments. We look forward to collaborating with Tapad and the industry as we collectively transition to support cookieless identity.  — Don Lee |SVP of Global Platform Partnerships | Eyeota   We are excited to participate in this proactive solution to the sunset of third-party cookies. Switchboard’s agnostic interoperability, with BritePool and other ID providers, will create high-value for marketers as they transition to the era of cookieless web advertising.  — David J. Moore | CEO | BritePool   Interoperability is paramount for brand marketers, agencies, publishers and platforms if we want to support an open and free Internet and break free of the stranglehold of walled gardens. Lotame Panorama ID’s participation in Switchboard reflects our steadfast commitment to collaborating across and within the industry and providing value to all of its players.  — Pierre Diennet | Global Partnerships | Lotame   At this pivotal moment in the industry, we are excited to be partnering with Tapad, a part of Experian on their cookieless initiative and making Retargetly IDx available into the Switchboard solution, providing global brands, platforms and publishers with a compliant, cookieless ID solution for the Latin American market; enabling them to target, reach and measure users at scale through the region.  — Daniel Czaplinski | CEO and Co-Founder | Retargetly   With Audigent’s Halo ID, we’re architecting a cookieless future where clients and partners have confidence in the actionability and interoperability of exclusive 1st party audiences, originated from some of the world’s leading publishers and creators. We see collaboration as being critical to a collective understanding of identity and Tapad, a part of Experian as a trusted partner with solutions such as Switchboard to support continuity for marketers’ addressability.  — Drew Stein | CEO and Founder | Audigent   Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5’s cookie-less IDs will be available to a wider audience of brands and agencies and enable them to run effective, data-driven campaigns beyond the third-party cookie.  — Mathieu Roche | CEO and Co-Founder | ID5   Addressing the current identity challenge requires transparency and collaboration. We are pleased to align ShareThis data with Tapad + Experian’s growing ecosystem. ShareThis data helps marketers evolve beyond the cookie to complete the picture. Tapad + Experian’s Switchboard offering will support ShareThis’s deep connections to clients and technology platforms, preserving and growing the accessibility of our data.  — Michael Gorman | SVP Product and Business Development | ShareThis   Get in touch

Feb 09,2021 by Experian Marketing Services

Hashed email onboarding: offline to online connectivity

With the emergence of email addresses as a currency for brands to communicate with their consumers offline; attaching email data to in-store purchases lays the groundwork for future advertising strategies. However, this advantage in having an additional digital touchpoint also creates a new challenge for marketers. How do they connect what they know about their customers via offline data and PII, or personally identifiable information, with what they want to know about their online behaviors and interactions? Taken a step further, how can they create actionable strategies that connect these two streams of consumer insights in order to drive them to make more future purchases; and even become loyalists? At a time when the shift from traditional to online shopping feels more like a landslide; connecting online and offline data has never been more valuable or more urgent. The solution for these marketers lies in the framework of identity resolution; and a key capability called hashed email onboarding. Hashed email onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers. The methodology prevents the consumers actual email address from being readable; while still providing marketers a connection between those emails and other touchpoints for an individual. Instead of understanding the customer journey in two distinct parts; how they interact with a brand or company offline and separately how they interact with a brand online; hashed email onboarding allows for the two parts to be woven together in a holistic view of that consumer. The power of connecting these data sets can be seen when combining offline and online attribution and measurement to improve frequency capping and look-alike modeling. It’s important to note that not all identity resolution vendors that onboard hashed emails function in the same way or provide the same level of data. Some connect only to desktop or only to mobile devices; while others don’t actually make direct linkages at all- they simply provide the hashed emails as a targetable digital audience for upload. While hashed email onboarding and the connection between offline and online data is a powerful strategy; it needs to be as structured as possible across the most data available to reveal truly efficient targeting and measurement strategies. Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get in touch

Jan 25,2021 by Experian Marketing Services

Tapad joins the Experian family!

To our valued customers and partners, it’s been an exciting week here at Tapad! As announced in a press release this morning, Tapad is now a member of the Experian family. We’re thrilled to continue to grow as a leader in identity resolution under the umbrella of a global expert in data, analytics and technology. Tapad and Experian are deeply connected by our commitment to serving the needs of our customers; and with a focus on quality of the data we provide, we have a common goal for the future of identity in the advertising ecosystem. As part of this announcement, we wanted to assure you, our valued customer, that we remain deeply committed to serving you today just as we always have. Nothing will change in your daily operations with Tapad. Experian immediately recognized that the success and growth of Tapad was directly tied to the strength and depth of its team members. As such, the acquisition will not result in any changes to day-to-day contacts at Tapad, or processes with weekly graph deliveries and other product support. Experian’s faith and investment in Tapad’s future and the future of identity resolution underscores what we’ve always believed our products could achieve and that we will be able to continue serving brands, advertisers, publishers, and the advertising and marketing ecosystem for years to come. On a personal note, I am excited to be transitioning my role as Chief Operating Officer of Tapad to the General Manager position of a global business that’s achieved exponential growth over the past several years; culminating in this strategic acquisition that will no doubt bring even more value to our customers in the future. We remain committed to open communication and welcome any questions you may have. Thank you,Mark Connon | General Manager, Tapad Contact us today

Nov 19,2020 by Experian Marketing Services


Appendix

New year, new gear-ers

  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Shopping Behavior > Big-Box Electronics Stores: High Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Shopping Behavior > Big Box and Club Stores: Amazon Frequent Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Shopping Behavior > Department Store In Store Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Apparel > Teen Apparel (Clothing): Online High Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Apparel > Teen Apparel (Clothing): In Store High Spenders
  • Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Technology > Dell Computer Model
  • Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Technology > Apple Mac Purchaser Model

Weeknight TV watchers

  • Television (TV) > Household/Family Viewing > Co-Watchers
  • Television (TV) > Household/Family Viewing > Co-Watchers with Children
  • Experian > Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Entertainment > Streaming/Video/Audio/CTV/Cable TV: Cable/Broadcast TV: Cord Cutters: Recent
  • TrueTouch: Communication Preference > Engagement Channel Preference > Streaming TV
  • TrueTouch: Communication Preference > Engagement Channel Preference > Digital Video

Parenting personas

  • Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Personas > Digital Moms
  • Lifestyle and Interests (Affinity) > Personas > Digital Dads
  • Mosaic – Personas – Lifestyle and Interests > Group D: Suburban Style > D15 – Sports Utility Families
  • Mosaic – Personas – Lifestyle and Interests > Group O: Singles and Starters > O53 – Colleges and Cafes
  • Mosaic – Personas – Lifestyle and Interests > Group A: Power Elite > A03 – Kids and Cabernet

School-season meal planners

  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Grocery > Online Grocery Delivery Services: High Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Grocery > Grocery Stores: High Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants: Fast Food/QSR QSR Frequent Spenders
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Food and Drink > Restaurants > Fast Food/QSR Pizza Frequent Spenders

Core back-to-school shoppers

  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – Elementary School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – Middle School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Moderate Spend – High School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – Elementary School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – Middle School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School High Spend – High School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – Elementary School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – Middle School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Apparel – High School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – PreK (Early Ed – PreK)
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – Elementary School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – Middle School
  • Retail Shoppers: Purchase Based > Seasonal > Back to School Supplies – High School

Subscribe to our newsletter

Enter your name and email for the latest updates

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

About Experian Marketing Services

At Experian Marketing Services, we use data and insights to help brands have more meaningful interactions with people. As leaders in the evolution of the advertising landscape, Experian Marketing Services can help you identify your customers and the right potential customers, uncover the most appropriate communication channels, develop messages that resonate, and measure the effectiveness of marketing activities and campaigns.

Visit our website

Subscribe to our newsletter

Stay up to date on the latest industry news and receive expert tips from our marketing experts.
Subscribe now!